Miami

Miami is an Atlantic Ocean seaport in the southern US state of Florida, the fourth-largest urban area in the USA after New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. In 2007, Miami was rated the richest city in America, and it is currently known for having good air quality, beautiful beaches, clean water and streets, and for being the "capital of Latin America" due to its large Cuban population.

History
In 1567, the Spanish missionary Pedro Menendez de Aviles built a mission at the site of the present-day city of Miami, just two years after building the city of St. Augustine (which is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement established in the United States). In 1836, after Florida was ceded to the United States, Fort Dallas was built at the site of the mission in order to keep the Seminoles down, and the land was later purchased by Cleveland businesswoman Julia Tuttle. Miami grew in size over the next few decades, and it became a city on 28 July 1896. During the 1900s, African-American laborers and immigrants from the Bahamas made up 40% of the city's population, and the city rapidly grew in the 1920s. During World War II, Miami became a base for the US Navy against German Kriegsmarine submarines, and the population grew to 172,172 in 1940. More immigrants would arrive from Cuba in 1959, with wealthy Cuban businessmen leaving the island with their money in order to prevent Fidel Castro's communist government from forcing them to share their money with the impoverished.

20th and 21st centuries
However, Miami was a center of the cocaine epidemic during the late 1970s and the 1980s, with Colombian criminal Carlos Lehder introducing the drug to the American market in 1979 after Medellin Cartel associate "El Leon" gave him several kilograms of it. Criminals such as Tommy Vercetti and Tony Montana rose to power in the dangerous city, and the crime rate rapidly rose in the city as murders grew as the amount of available money grew.

The 1980 Mariel Boatlift brought in another wave of Cuban immigrants, but this boatlift brought in people that had just been released from Castro's prisons, consisting of both innocent political prisoners as well as violent criminals. Immigration from Haiti also grew due to the opposition to the Duvalier dictatorship, and the Cuban and Haitian communities formed "Little Havana" and "Little Haiti" in their own ghettoes (these neighborhoods would clash in 1986). By the late 1980s, the government had clamped down on drug dealers in the city and put an end to much of the gang violence, but a crippling housing crisis in 2012 made Miami the "second most miserable city in the USA" and led to the metro area having one of the highest crime rates in the country.

In 2010, Miami and its metropolitan area had a population of 5,564,635 people. 62.9% of the population was Hispanic (34.4% Cuban, 7.2% Nicaraguan, 5.8% Honduran, 3.2% Colombian, 3.2% Puerto Rican, 2.4% Dominican, 1.5% Mexican, 1.4% Venezuelan, 1.2% Peruvian, 1.2% Argentinian, 1.2% Salvadoran, 1% Guatemalan, .7% Ecuadorian, and .5% Spanish), 19.2% black (4.4% Haitian, 3% black Hispanic, .4% sub-Saharan African, .4% Jamaican, .4% Bahamian, .1% British West Indies inhabitants, .1% from Trinidad and Tobago, and .1% other West Indian), 11.9% white (1.7% German, 1.6% Italian, 1.4% Irish, 1% English, .8% French, .6% Russian, and .5% Polish), and 1% Asian (.3% Indian, .3% Chinese, .2% Filipino, .1% Japanese, .1% Korean, and 125 people were Vietnamese).